She laughingly insisted that she was not worried at all. When he persisted she made an excuse to leave the room. He called after her.
“You are as stubborn as Balaam’s jackass,” he vowed. “All right. I have got a little of that animal in me. If you won’t tell me I shall have to find out for myself.”
It was Captain Benjamin Snow who disclosed the secret. Captain Ben, still the loyal friend and as regular a caller at the big house as its owner would permit, took the opportunity when Townsend and he were alone in the library—Nabby having gone to prayer-meeting and Reliance to the post office—to speak of what had troubled him for more than a month.
“I should have told you sooner, Foster,” he said, “but the doctor wouldn’t hear of it. Said you just simply mustn’t be bothered, that’s all. I wonder somebody hasn’t told you when you were down street. The whole town is talkin’ about it. It is too late to do anything, I guess; yes, I know it is. But—”
Townsend interrupted. “For heaven’s sake!” he exclaimed, testily. “Stop running around the mainmast and get some sail on her. Come to the point, Ben. What are you trying to say?”
Captain Ben said it then. Reliance Clark was to lose her place as postmistress. The time for her reappointment was at hand and that reappointment would not be made. Congressman Mooney had taken the matter into his own hands and he had picked Simeon Thacher for the office. Thacher was the Honorable Mooney’s friend and henchman. He had earned reward and now he was to have it. Rival petitions had been circulated; Reliance’s friends had rallied and her petition was much the longer of the two. But Thacher had the inside pull at Washington and his was the winning side.
“We are all of us, all the best folks in town, as sorry as we can be, Foster,” declared Captain Ben. “We all like Reliance and she has made a first-rate postmistress, but what can you do against politics? They’ve trumped up charges, of course, said Millard was no good as assistant, and that is true enough, but those charges don’t cut any figure. It’s Mooney’s drag with the Washin’ton folks that has done the trick. He is smart and a coming man in the party, everybody says so. He is getting to be the county boss, that is what he is getting to be.”
Foster Townsend had listened with, for him, surprising patience. Now he broke in.
“What!” he cried. “He is, eh? County boss already! I want to know!... Ben Snow, how long has this been going on? What do you mean by keeping it from me?”
Snow shook his head. “First I heard of it was just before you were taken sick, Foster,” he said. “That’s when it came out, but I guess it was going on, underneath, a long, long while before that. And then, after you was sick, I couldn’t see you, of course. And, even now, if the doctor knew—”